This chapter provides a brief overview of the political history of the Islamic world, from the seventh-century Arabian conquests to the formation, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, of the three great early modern Muslim empires: the Ottomans in Asia Minor, the Safavids in Iran and the Mughals in India. Its structure reflects the major political formations and transformations of this period: firstly, the Arabian ‘conquest polity’ which replaced the antique balance between Rome and Iran; then, after the demise of that empire in the mid-tenth century, the tumultuous era of ‘Berber’, Daylami and Turkic leaderships; finally, following the cataclysmic Mongol conquest of the eastern Islamic lands in 1258, the assimilation of these conquerors in the east and the political achievements of Turco-Mongol military strongmen and entrepreneurs in Syria, Egypt, Yemen and Anatolia. It looks at the elites and political structures that shaped and underlay this history and at their interaction with Islam. This had developed into a more fully articulated and stable ideological system, whose continued success lay in the new elites’ capacity to adopt and adapt it to their needs.

In 1934, the US federal government launched a project to plant shelterbelts of trees across the Great Plains to protect the land from the drying and erosive force of the wind during the Dust Bowl. There were initial hopes that the belts would moderate the climate of the region. The decision to launch the project was based, in part, on Russian experience of forestry and shelterbelts in the steppes that dated back to the early nineteenth century. One of the conduits for Russian and Soviet expertise was a Russian–Jewish émigré, Raphael Zon, who was the director of a forestry experiment station in St. Paul, Minnesota. This chapter analyzes: Russian experience of forestry and shelterbelts in the steppes; American forestry in the Great Plains before the Shelterbelt Project; and the transfer of relevant Russian experience, and Russian trees, to the United States.

The Conclusion considers the legacies of the “Russian roots” of Great Plains agriculture down to the present day as well as tying together the argument. Attention is paid to the differences between the environments and environmental histories of the two regions: The climate of the steppes is generally slightly harsher than the Great Plains due in part to the different orientations (E–W and N–S) of the two regions and the agricultural settlement of the steppes began several decades prior to that of the Great Plains. Thus, crops that could cope with the extremes of the climate in the steppes could survive all but the most extreme fluctuations in the Great Plains. And, there was prior experience in the steppes of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union that Americans could draw on.

The tumbleweed, or Russian thistle, has become an icon of the American West, celebrated in songs and movies. But, in reality it is an invasive species that causes great harm to other plants, animals, and humans. It thrives in dry conditions when other plants struggle. It was brought to the Great Plains from the steppes by mistake, in sacks of flax seed, by immigrants to South Dakota in the 1870s. It has defied attempts by agricultural scientists and state and federal government agencies to control or eliminate it.

In the 1870s and 1880s, Russian soil scientists under Vasilii Dokuchaev devised an innovative science of soils. They understood soils as natural-historical bodies that had formed in the environments in which they existed. The innovation, which was based on field work in the steppes, allowed the mapping of large soil groups over extensive areas. It could be applied around the world and suggested that the soils of the Great Plains were similar to those of the steppes. The US government soil survey that began in 1899 under the direction of Milton Whitney was largely limited to a physical and geological understanding of soils. Whitney was hostile to the Russian innovation and tried to prevent its spread among American scientists.

This chapter surveys the dissemination of the Russian innovation in soil science in the United States. The chief architect of a “Russian revolution” in US government soil science was Curtis Marbut, who headed the US Soil Survey from 1910 until 1934. Marbut became convinced by the Russian science after reading a book by Russian scientist Konstantin Glinka published in German in 1914. Marbut tested the Russian approach in the Great Plains. He worked hard to persuade workers in the US Soil Survey of the need to change the methodology. Marbut had succeeded by the late 1920s. He was assisted by two Russian émigrés – soil scientists, Jacob Joffe and Constantine Nikiforoff. Links between American and Soviet soil scientists were cemented at two scientific Congresses, in the United States and the Soviet Union, in 1927 and 1930. By the 1930s, US soil maps designated the soils of the Great Plains “Chernozems,” using the Russian term.

This second chapter on Shelterbelt Project explains that it was launched in the summer of 1934 to address the Dust Bowl, but also because the Forest Service was seeking to get access to New Deal relief funds to make up for the cuts in its research budget. Raphael Zon in St. Paul, Minnesota and Edward Munns in Washington, DC, drew on Russian and Soviet studies to convince the president to approve their plan. Zon and his colleagues also drew on Russian studies in preparing a technical manual for the project. Zon fell out with the project’s administrative director, Paul Roberts in 1935. Thereafter, American experience played a larger role in the project, until it was brought to an end in 1942.